Sitemap on website!

What is the purpose?

[pseudoengineer]

We recently got the "smart" idea of expanding our sitemap to individually list and link to every page on our site using a format like keyword-A, keyword-B, keyword-C...where the same keyword is listed dozens of times. We were actually thinking we could make the sitemap into a table of contents that surfers could actually use. Our's is a commercial site consisting of a couple hundred pages (many being pdf spec sheets) showing the products we manufacture and sell, however we do not sell online. The purpose of the site is to inform and generate request for quotes. There are six different keywords on the sitemap, each repeated dozens of times with unique, trailing, qualifying adjectives. The sitemap is linked from the index page and every other page on the site. Before the "expansion", it used to carry a pagerank of 5; now it is 0 (a white bar). Initially the expansion was a success. We maintained pr5 and the sitemap itself did rank fairly high for a number of keywords; in many cases it was our highest ranked page for a particular keyword. But did we outsmart ourselves and incur a Google penalty for spam? Would this be an automatic, algorithm-generated penalty or one that would have to be reported manually?

[trillianjedi]

Search on here for "links page penalty" - there was a very long thread about this a few days ago.

TJ

[pseudoengineer]

Hi trillianjedi,

Thanks for the input. How can I follow your link?

[trillianjedi]

No, it wasn't a link.

Click on "site search" at the top of this page.

Then put in as a search "links page penalty" and click search.

That will find you the thread (very long) in whcih this was discussed. I can't remember the conclusion...

TJ

[pseudoengineer]

Hello again trillianjedi,

I found the thread. It'll be interesting reading, although at 19 pages long, I'm not sure if it'll be possible to draw a conclusion. ;-)

[annej]

pseudoengineer, all my pages that went up in the last couple of months or so are now PR0. A couple are links pages and one is a site map but others are content articles so I don't think it's the links. I think it's just anything newish. These had perfectly fine PR until this strange update.

I think we are just going to have to wait to see how it all comes out in the end. My theory is that Google has gone back to old data that they collected before we ever published these pages so Google thinks they don't exist in terms of PR.

The purpose of a site map should be to help your visitors find their way around. It's been suggested on this forum that a site map may help Googlebot find all your pages as well. Right now who knows!

[steveb]

Any page put up after February 15 or so has no real pagerank and will likely/often/usually show as PR0. It means nothing, and certainly is not a sign of a penalty.

[Stefan]

True. There is no more inherited PR and because the index is based on a very old crawl everything put up since Feb is grey bar or PR0. It's not a penalty.